Interesting post here by Sara Robinson in which she uses D.H. Fischer's Albion's Seed as a tool to explain how voting patterns follow cultural patterns that are rooted in the four colonial-era English cultural groups: Puritans, Cavaliers, Scots-Irish, and Quakers.  My early 2006 post entitled The Spirit of Whiggery covers much of the same ground.  What we have come to think of as "liberalism" is rooted in the culturally Whiggish legacy of the Puritans and Quakers; what we have come to think of as "conservatism" rooted in the legacy of the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish. If you're unfamiliar with the characteristics that define the attitudes of these groups, read Robinson's post. She provides a clear, concise summary.

It's interesting to see how American political history is shaped by this cultural patterning. The Republican Party was a Whig creation and the Democratic Party a Cavalier/Scots-Irish creation. The old Republicans, therefore, were more culturally liberal and intellectual, while at the same time the party of the Northeastern and Midwestern financial elite. The original Democrats were more culturally traditionalist and economically populist. The realignment that took place in the period between 1968 and 1980 disconnected the parties from their cultural roots, while each maintained its economic philosophy.

During that realignment, the Dems lost their ownership of the culturally conservative, southern-agrarian and northern blue-collar Dems as it became identified with the more educated, culturally liberal Whigs while they retained, at least in theory, its economic populism; the GOP lost its Whiggish northeast cosmopolitanism as it sought to embrace conservative evangelicals and Catholics, while it remained the party of the northern business elite now in alliance with converted southern elites. The party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Nelson Rockefeller became the party of Reagan, Tom Delay, and Newt Gingrich.

This alliance of both southern and northern economic elites in the Republican Party is not something you hear much about.  These southern and northern elites were at loggerheads during the post-Civil War period until the birth of the New South in the 70s. That this is no longer the case is significant because if before this conflict between regional elites acted as a check to each faction's power, now as a united force there is virtually no check on them.  And while Whiggish ideas about social responsibility played on the consciences of the old northeastern business elites, whatever buffering effect that might have had hardly exists at all as the kind of wildcat buccaneering of Enron or the exploitative plantation mentality of Wal-Mart have become more the norm in Republican business culture as the party lost its northern Whiggishness and became southernized.

There is also a significance in this re-alignment insofar as it separates much of the electorate from it political/cultural roots.  I'm not sure I understand it, but I think it contributes to the way politics has become a fantasy divorced from lived reality for so many Americans. It's as if all the circuits have shorted out, and our politics is composed of the acrid-smelling smoke produced that floats in the air afterward.  In any event, the Dems are currently the legatees of the Whig spirit which in the party's inception it opposed, and the GOP continues as the legatee of the Whiggish moneyed classes but now in a strange coalition with the southern Bourbon elite, the pugnacious Scots-Irish, and other low-education, religiously conservative immigrant groups.  

The crisis of liberalism is basically a crisis of Whiggery, which lost its moorings in traditional religion when the northeastern intellectual elites rejected their Puritan heritage and became Unitarians. The Whig spirit in the 19th Century was the progressive social force behind the abolitionists and the reformers and suffragettes in the early 20th century. But it slowly devolved into an incoherent patchwork of flaky multi-culturalists, angry feminists, couch-potato Marxists, romantic environmentalists, anything-goes cosmopolitans, avante-garde cultural elites and liberationists of every stripe who openly oppose traditional religion and social mores. Whatever the validity of the causes these groups espoused, they represented a rejection of the familiar and comfortable, and insofar as they became associated with the Democratic brand, the party became difficult for Main Street to embrace, even if its economic interests lay more with the Dems. And the Republicans have done and will continue to do their best to make sure the Democrats have this branding problem on Main Street.

The Republicans understand the economic cultural disconnect and have been masterful in exploiting it. Their strategy to exploit it explains the whole elitist rap on Kerry and now Obama; it explains the tire gauges vs. off-shore drilling idiocy; it explains the attempt to associate Obama with Paris and Brittany. It explains McCain's wince-producing, unpresidential performance in Sturgis. These are not strategies designed to appeal to the rational judgment of Americans, but to the prejudices of the culturally conservative, low-information Main Streeters whose political and economic interests have nothing in common with the economic elites who run the GOP. It works and it will continue to work so long as the Dems have the branding problem described above.

So I agree with Sara Robinson when she says many Americans have no respect for anyone who won't fight for what he believes in, and I think there is some truth in her analysis of the the historical roots of the non-pugnacious Whig style, but Whigs while more moderate than the Scots-Irish, were in their more robust incarnations people who fought passionately for the ideals they believed in–whether abolition, women's suffrage, the progressive policies that led to TR's constraints on corporate greed, and FDR's New Deal. But Whiggery has degraded, and the current incarnation of the Whig is typified by Cass Sunstein and John Kerry, and we recognize them today as a type: the weak-kneed liberal. 

The so-called liberals who dominated the leadership of the Democratic Party don't fight for principle because principle is just a platitude for most of them that has nothing to do with political reality. They pay lip service to principles and then do what serves their personal self-interest. They don't fight for what they believe in because there is nothing they believe in that is worth fighting for. Since they have no principles worth fighting for, they cave to whatever pressure is exerted on them and take the path of least resistance. 

They collaborate with the equally unprincipled conservative Republicans because the Republicans are unconflicted about their lack of principles. They have the benefit of working toward the achievement of a simple objective: the removal of constraints on elites to do as they please. And so the Dems secretly envy them and cannot bring themselves to oppose them on matters of essential interest to elites.  As members in good standing of the country's political elite, what reason have Democrat leaders, except principle, to oppose the Republican agenda to remove constraints on the nation's elite? What motivation have they to constrain themselves and their elite friends, except principle and commitment to republican ideals?  If they have no principles or ideals to motivate them, their personal self-interest is too closely allied with the conservative agenda for them to work assiduously to oppose it. So they don't.

I had hoped that Obama represented a retrieval of the older, robust, principled Whig style.  He has all the tools to be that, and he might yet become that.  But for now he's looking more the weak-kneed, play-it-safe liberal that sensible Americans rightly have come to despise. He's not a finished product; he's got a lot to learn.  I still believe in his potential for greatness. But at some point he's got to distance himself from the weak-kneed types who are running in his posse.

The American Soul is hardwired to be receptive to a robust incarnation of the old-time, principled Whig. That Whiggery in its undegraded form represents what is best about our country, and the country badly needs  somebody to take up the old Whig standard and march with it. If Obama finds a way to rise to the challenge, he will find that the best kind of Americans will follow him, and fight passionately to support him.  Right now those Americans look at him and say: Prove to me you're not just another weak-kneed liberal who doesn't believe in anything worth fighting for. 

He's got to make a choice.  Does he want to play it safe, or does he want to make a difference?